NVIDIA Announces New Planned Investments in Korean Startups at the MSIT-NVIDIA AI Startup Partnership Forum

Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and NVIDIA co-hosted the MSIT-NVIDIA AI Startup Partnership Forum at COEX, where Vice Minister of Science and ICT Ryu Je-myung joined NVIDIA leaders to meet with more than 20 Korean startups. The companies in attendance spanned foundation models, physical AI, AI infrastructure and AI semiconductors.

At the event, NVIDIA announced an investment in Point2 Technology, an AI interconnect company, and said it has additional investments planned for Motif Technologies, RLWRLD and Upstage. The four companies were described as representing work across the full AI stack, from infrastructure through models to robotics applications.

Point2 builds radio frequency-based interconnects designed to move data between chips and racks inside AI factories. NVIDIA positioned the technology as an alternative to conventional copper and optical interconnect approaches for AI cluster scale-up, citing reach, performance and efficiency for next-generation AI infrastructure. Motif Technologies, a Seoul-based AI lab, develops foundation models for agents handling complex tasks, including Motif-3, a large language model released with open weights.

The other two planned investment targets operate further up the stack. RLWRLD, a physical AI startup with offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Tokyo, builds robotics foundation models aimed at humanoid and industrial robots performing five-finger dexterity tasks — such as inserting components, threading nuts onto bolts and kitting parts from moving conveyors. Upstage, a Korean enterprise AI company, develops Solar language models and document AI tools for extracting information from complex documents, streamlining workflows and building AI applications for everyday operations.

NVIDIA framed the announcements as an extension of its existing work with Korea's startup and venture community, noting that NVIDIA Inception — its startup program offering preferred pricing, technical expertise and investor introductions — counts more than 1,000 Korea-based members. The forum thus pairs government participation with vendor program reach, putting Korea's ministry alongside NVIDIA in scouting and backing companies across the stack.

What remains unstated are the sizes of the announced and planned investments, the timeline for closing them, and whether the ministry's involvement carries any matching funds or policy commitments. Also open: how many of the 20-plus attending startups, beyond the four named, are in NVIDIA's pipeline, and whether the interconnect bets — a domain where copper, optics and now RF approaches compete — will shape how AI clusters scale in practice.

For builders, the signal is that vendor-backed startup funding is increasingly stack-wide and internationally coordinated, with government co-hosting the scouting process. Expect similar forums elsewhere, and watch whether named startups gain access to NVIDIA's developer and Inception channels as a distribution advantage.